This article showcases a case study of Bookaway’s landing page performance. It’s about a couple of things that Bookaway faced and Liran Cohen (as part of a company in the traveling industry) managed to optimize the pages, so that the HTML they send is smaller. Smaller HTML means less time for Google to download and process those long strings of text. Today you’ll see how taking care of the props you send to Next.js pages can make loading times and Web Vitals better.
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If you’re an agency owner, you know that you need customers to grow. No matter how big your dreams are, customers are the lifeblood of your business. But you’re probably wondering — how do you attract quality, high-paying clients?Selling is key to growing your web design business, but it doesn’t have to be complicated! With clear goals, customer research, and proven closing techniques, anyone can find new clients.
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Choosing to use a new technology can often bring much desired productivity, security, and efficiency to a project. It is also fraught with risk and uncertainty. How and when to adopt a new technology for client projects is at the heart of leading a great agency. In this article, Michael Rispoli explains how he evaluated the decision of whether or not to adopt a serverless database for client projects.
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Wondering what’s happenin’ at Smashing? Well, we’ve been busy. Here’s a little story of how we removed floating labels, improved performance on mobile, and launched a new series of articles. Oh, and how you can contribute to Smashing, too.
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The secret to growing a successful web design business is thinking of design as a service, not a product. When you focus on recurring revenue and sell to one targeted niche, you can grow a business faster than ever. In this two-part series, Stephen Roe shares the agency growth lessons we’ve learned. In this first part, we break down the pricing model that’s worked best for us and explain how to leverage it in your business. In the next article, we’ll share proven sales techniques you can use as you scale.
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In this article, we’ll take a close look at some of the changes we made on this very site — running on JAMStack with React — to optimize the web performance and improve the Core Web Vitals metrics. With some of the mistakes we’ve made, and some of the unexpected changes that helped boost all the metrics across the board. Hopefully, this little case-study will be useful to you, and perhaps there are one or two techniques that you might be able to apply to your project right away. In the end, performance is all about a sum of all the fine little details, that, when added up, make or break your customer’s experience.
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Learn about the basics of animation in After Effects by animating one of the most famous type characters and the state of the iMessage App Store in 2018 when it comes to stickers. In this article, Simon Schmid brings you a step-by-step guide of setting up a canvas in After Effects and then he will go through with the animation. You’ll also read about how well the app containing more than 30 animated stickers worked and what some of the specific issues are you might be having on the App Store for iMessage.
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Learning to code can be tough. If you are new to JavaScript and/or have struggles adding it to your skillset, Murat Kemaldar may have an approach for you to overcome those barriers. You are definitely not alone, and you have every right to think that learning to code is a tough nut to crack. In this article, Murat shares his advice on how writing code differently and poetically has helped him overcome his initial struggles and insecurities.
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Project goals, processes, and responsibilities should be clear to everyone on your team. Don’t focus on a unique design per se, unless that’s the main feature of your product, and collaborate with other designers whenever possible. When two people are thinking about the same problem, they will deliver better ideas. In this article, Boyan Kostov shares his story and lessons learned from redesigning a digital interior design shop.
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